Final Call for Papers, AAG Annual Meeting, Boston, April 5-9, 2017 (http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting)
Session Title:
Cartographic reconstruction of environmental histories
Organizer:
Martin C. Lukas, University of Bremen, Sustainability Research Center (artec), MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences
Session Description:
Historical maps provide significant potential for research into environmental histories. They often represent the only source of historical spatial information. Yet, most of their potential has not been realised. The limited availability and accuracy of early maps and intervening periods without cartographic surveys limit the temporal scale and resolution of analysis, pose methodological challenges, and introduce uncertainty. The further we expand our analysis of environmental change into the past, the more our inquiry is constrained by the limited accuracy of historical maps. While contemporary satellite images and aerial photographs provide very precise and accurate images of almost the entire world at resolutions of a few meters or less, historical topographic maps from the nineteenth or early twentieth century are marked by inaccuracies of tens or hundreds of meters, and earlier charts only depict a small range of topographic features and include completely uncharted territories. This is a dilemma, because for a realistic understanding of environmental changes and their drivers, we often want to look back at least a few centuries. Various questions and challenges arise in this context:
§ How to assess and compare the reliability of different historical maps?
§ At minimum, how accurate must historical maps be in order to be used for which kind of analysis?
§ Where does the extent of map inaccuracy delimit the temporal scale of a historical cartographic analysis of environmental change?
§ How can analyses of earlier maps with comparably low levels of accuracy or completeness be combined with analyses of more recent, more accurate maps and satellite images?
§ What are the limits and pitfalls of cartographic reconstructions of historical environmental change? How can such pitfalls be avoided?
In order to foster scholarship at the intersection between historical cartography and environmental history and to advance and share knowledge, I seek papers that present any kind of cartographic reconstructions of historical environmental change, that analyse historical maps quantitatively or qualitatively, that link environmental and cartographic histories, or that relate to any of the questions raised above. Conceptual, methodological as well as empirical contributions are welcome.
Please email your abstract of up to 250 words to Martin Lukas ([log in to unmask]) by Wednesday, November 16th. Successful applicants will need to submit their abstracts online to the AAG by November 17th.
-- Dipl. Geogr. Martin C. Lukas artec Forschungszentrum Nachhaltigkeit (Sustainability Research Center) Associate Scientist GLOMAR - Bremen International Graduate School for Marine Sciences MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences University of Bremen Enrique-Schmidt-Str. 7 28359 Bremen Phone: +49-421-218 61851